Fall Fun, Painting Pumpkins

October is here and this means it is the season for pumpkins!!!! There is something about autumn that it is very easy to get into the fall spirit. Bring on the pumpkins, the apple picking, the baking, the pumpkin spice latte, the scarecrow decorations, crafts and Halloween celebrations!

Every year we carve pumpkins but pumpkins don’t last as long as we’d like and they always end up moldy after two or three days. Last year we started a new tradition to enjoy the pumpkins a little big longer …. Pumpkin Painting!!!

This is a great activity for the whole family. Our teen got a little creative, suggesting building Olaf from the movie Frozen (we all have to help with this) and the little one of the family did free style and made his own festive and unique design

A few suggestions for pumpkin painting:

Before painting, make sure your pumpkins are gently washed with soap and water.

We used acrylic paint with our teen to paint Olaf. We always wear old clothing because if acrylic paint ends up on your clothing, it can stain.

For Olaf’s face we printed a stencil and used a pencil to trace the outlines of the design into the pumpkin.

8 Comments on “Fall Fun, Painting Pumpkins”

These are adorable! I am a Kindergarten teacher and we want to create Olaf for a fall festival at our school…How did you get the three pumpkins to stay stacked upon one another? A rod down the middle? Glue??

To get the three pumpkins to stay stacked upon one another was the most difficult part. I didn’t want to open or puncture any of the pumpkins to avoid them to rot prematurely. If you don’t care about how long it lasts then a garden stick straight through them works better and will be stronger.

You have to spend some time looking for the right pumpkins where the surface area aligns to the other pumpkin touching it. They should be able to stack evenly without any assistance. Make sure there are no big gaps between pumpkins. We glued the pumpkins using a hot glue gun. Make sure you don’t paint the area where you are going to glue it. Glue will stick to the paint and not the pumpkin and the paint will peel right off. Our first mistake… It’s ok and easier to paint before you glue but just leave the areas to glue without paint and you can paint this section later.

Once I glued it, I put it at the front door and did not move it again. 😉 It’s been 20 days now and it’s still together but Olaf’s head which is a squash is starting to soften.

For Olaf’s nose I used orange felt. I bought a 9″ x 12 felt sheet at Michaels. I cut a square out of the material and used one corner of the square as the starting point of the tip of a cone. I hand sowed the edge of the cone first and then added Interfacing material to give it additional strength but you can stuff it if you’d like. I then hand sowed a circle at the end of the cone to complete the nose. I glued the nose, circle side to Olaf’s face with the hot glue gun.